“There’s fire, let’s go!” His partner, who at the time was recording a video of their 10-month-old baby, did not listen to him and he repeated the instruction. Rafael Colominas, his partner and the little boy hurried down the building’s elevator. “When we got downstairs, the tongue of fire had already reached the table where I was minutes before.”
Rafael was lucky that day to be home. “Normally, I’m at the gym at that time, but that Thursday I was on the terrace and I noticed the smell,” he explains. “When I looked out for the second time I saw the fire and we ran away.” He tells how pieces of the facade went up and how he began to realize that this was beginning to be dangerous for his family.
Rafael’s head peeking out onto the terrace appears in one of the most viral videos of the fire that were recorded and shows the start of the fire at door 86 of the 14-story block in the Campanar neighborhood. Without being able to imagine what would happen minutes later, he and his partner picked up the baby and went down to the patio. She didn’t even take the bag – now she must get all her documentation – because as Rafael explains, they didn’t think that her apartment, purchased in 2014 and completely renovated, would be a fire pit. 10 people died.
Five days later, Rafael returned this Tuesday to the surroundings of the burned-out building in the hope of being able to enter or for the firefighters to confirm if anything of value had been saved.
Although she bought “the most insulated windows” and changed the materials in view of the baby’s arrival, she doubted if anything was left. He looked at his attic helplessly: “It’s all black, I don’t know if it’s because of the smoke or if it’s all gone to waste.” He admits that with the temperatures of more than a thousand degrees that were reached at the top of the building, little can be recovered, but there he was waiting for permission to climb.
Rafael has heard that his neighbors have been able to recover some safes from inside their houses. He even mentions the video of a neighbor who managed to find some rings, although he points out that the contents of some safes are “melted.” “We have burned our son’s umbilical cord, his first footprint, all the gifts from when he was born 10 months ago, all of his things…” Those memories are the ones that hurt him to have lost because he admits that his and his partner’s clothes can be bought. He still doesn’t understand that “someone could authorize a flammable building.”
While waiting to be let up, Rafael is also waiting for the call to relocate to the Safranar building where some of his neighbors are already installed. He hopes to do so soon to begin “recomposing” his life with his partner and his 10-month-old son. Since Thursday he has been on a sofa bed at a friend’s house, coming and going in search of answers. For this reason, he admits that he is a little “disoriented” and justifies himself: “before we had a home, a neighborhood and now we have nothing.”
